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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Then congratulations Apple, for making a not so great map even worse. I can't really judge map quality in the US, but in Germany it sucks. Cities show up twice or are missing completely, labels are often small, unreadable and ugly. There is no consistency in the placement of lables.

OSM has its fair share of inconsistencies but it's not that bad.

The map is ok for what it is: Just for presentation inside of iPhoto, not for browsing or finding your way. I really hope that Apple doesn't plan to use this anywhere else and hat they just didn't go with Google because they can't customize their maps any way they want.

(That missing credit is also shameful. I was looking everywhere inside of iPhoto but couldn't find it. Stuff like that sould at least be moderately easy to find.)

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> but in Germany it sucks

That's funny. A German client of mine specifically asked me to put an OpenStreetMap map right next to the Google Map because the details of OpenStreetMap were more precise. The client creates POI geo coordinates and uses the maps to find the best position for a poi.

I don't know what's going on there. OSM does have lots of detail for Germany and the problems with OSM are more general ones with the consistency of label placement and such. No map breaking stuff.

Apple's tiles, however have more glaring mistakes (double labels, missing labels).

its missing detail? at least in my city its much more detailed than gmaps

OSM or Apple's maps? OSM has crazy amounts of accurate detail for all cities I know in Germany.

Apple's tiles have all the streets but not a lot of detail (probably by choice, nothing wrong with a sparser map, especially for the intended purpose) and the labels suck.

i meant osm. sorry for the misunderstanding.

It would be very helpful in this situation to actually mention your city? Promise we will not come after you.

With tigers.

It sounds like you're complaining about the quality of the OSM renderer, not the underlying data. There are a bunch of different renderers out there that can use OSM data - maybe one of the others would help?

Out of curiosity, I made a comparison between the two towns where most of my photos are taken as seen in GMaps vs. OSM.

http://cl.ly/133M1H3W2W362S2F0l13 http://cl.ly/2P2d3y042N1T0o2p390H

600k and 60k inhabitants respectively.

Interesting. From your screenshots, Apple's maps are so bad it's not even funny. It's just very, very bad. Steve would've never allowed such a thing to ship.

Is this a first sign that without an asshole with taste at the top, the erosion of Apple is inevitable?

You may be correct, but I'm not positive. These maps are used to give you an idea of where a photo was taken, not to provide navigation to it, so detail isn't quite as important. The other consideration is this is one data point. Perhaps Apple did a thousand of these and felt OSM was better.

Or, maybe Apple is going to quickly flame out.

The OSM images that tcard used are from openstreetmap.org, not from the iPhoto app.

My understanding is that Apple used the data from OSM to produce their own tiles, which, I believe, look much better than this.

As others have noted, Apple seem to be generating their own tiles from OSM data. ArsTechnica has a good screenshot here:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/03/apple-begins-using...

Dang... that makes GMaps look like Bing ;)

In my town (Santa Barbara, CA) OSM looks decent - not as many details as GMaps, but more than some others...

In my city it is way more detailed than gmaps. Even the smallest trails in the local park are in there, also cross-country ski runs in the mountains. I trust OSM will pretty much all my hiking plans.

The only thing that was missing in my city were a few house-numbers in some streets close to my apartment. So I went out and fixed it.

Apple's labels are strange, they aren't from OSM, but some other source. There are numerous differences between OSM labels and Apple labels.

According to the post, Apple's using an old version of the OSM data set.

> Then congratulations Apple, for making a not so great map even worse. I can't really judge map quality in the US, but in Germany it sucks.

That's very disappointing to hear. I understood that it was ever better than Google Maps in some parts of Europe.

In my short time playing with openstreetmap I learned that openstreetmap is more of a spec/aggregate/foundation entity that seems to be grouping "open street mapping" efforts under their banner. It's more of a spec than a single data source. I learned this when I had to go elsewhere (government sites and colleges) to find "open" street mapping data. It's was a little confusing to say the least and I still may be misunderstanding their actual position, but that's what I've learned.

Really? Isn't there at least a "main" source of map data that comes from openstreetmap.org? Mapquest is also experimenting with them (gotta stay relevant somehow right?), it seems to contain contributions I've made. (open.mapquest.com)

There most certainly is a single OSM database, so I'm not sure what GP is referring to.

Here's the dump: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/Planet.osm

I didn't even think it was good enough for iPhoto. On one of my photos (in the US), it showed some random town label that I wouldn't consider correct, zooming out didn't add any new labels, and it took forever to download any new tiles.

Also Spain has errors, they call the Madrid area "Los Madriles" which is pretty funny.

I don't know much about OSM, but I saw a comparison of the new map tiles in iPhoto with the same place in Google, and Google's seemed much more detailed. I know Apple is doing this to remove dependencies on G but I fear it could be a bit of a regression. I hope I'm wrong. In iPhoto that's not such a big deal, but other apps rely on the map much more.

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